Be sure to come hear Waterfall AntiPatterns with +Rick Viscomi at the +New Relic in San Francisco on June 6th.

Presentation Abstract:

You've been asked to investigate why your web site is loading slowly. You've heard of WebPagetest.org so you enter the URL and run a test. What appears next is a colorful chart that looks like a Dr. Seuss illustration. Some bars are long, some are short. Some bars are blue, some are green. "That's nice," you say to yourself, wondering what to do next. It looks benign, innocently simple. But you know it holds many secrets.

The waterfall chart is a mysterious force to some developers. Performance gurus seem to be able to divine the ailments of a slow site at one quick glance. "How?" you wonder. The reality is that anyone can read a waterfall chart - if they know that they are looking for.

This presentation will bestow upon you the ability to recognize specific patterns in a waterfall chart, patterns which are the signs of a slow site. Using these newfound skills, you will become that performance guru and everyone will rejoice.

We've seen reports from various companies about how changes in page load time affect conversions. We've also seen user surveys that tell you how quickly users expect pages to load. These are interesting numbers, but we wanted to look at things a little differently. Can we tell how different types of users react to page load times without actually asking them? How do user expectations change over time? How do I decide whether a performance problem is really something I should spend time fixing, or if it's okay to leave it be? How do we collect this data, and what do we do with it before it's clean enough to draw insights from?

In this talk we'll try and answer many of these questions.

And as a bonus, ask us how we reduce our Heisenberg coefficient to a minimum.

CSS is a simple declarative language. Preprocessors were introduced to overcome it’s many limitations. They add much needed language additions like simple inheritance, mixins, variables, and helpers. Developers have long awaited this functionality, and the use of CSSpreprocessors like SASS, Less, and Stylus has become ubiquitous on big websites. While preprocessors can be used to improve performance they often output some downright ugly code. During this talk, you will learn about a new set of performance best practices for projects that employ a CSS preprocessor.

By the end of the session, you’ll learn to

Choose between extend and includeUnderstand how subnodes affect the outputBuild base classes when your structure is complicatedUse placeholder classesCreate helpers and effectively use existing helpersKeep the SASS abstracted from the HTMLGet your media queries under controlYou’ll also hear about the top 5 preprocessor gotchas— I tried them all as I was converting the OOCSS open source project to SASS. In this session you’ll get to learn from my embarrassing mistakes!

So I am super excited to announce that +SF & SV Web Performance Meetup has not one, but two, that is right, two great meetups scheduled for May this month! Bonus points, we have a meetup in San Francisco for those of you in the North Bay of the Silicon Valley and one in the South Bay in Mountain View. You "speeders" in the middle get easy access to both.

Our first meetup is on Thursday, May 9th where we will be at the Yelp offices in SOMA, San Francisco with +Nicole Sullivan talking about "The Top 5 Performance Shenanigans of CSS Preprocessors". +Nicole Sullivan is a front-end performance consultant, CSS aficionado, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also did the co-creator of Smush.it and CSS Lint. Space is filling up fast, you do not want to miss this one. http://meetu.ps/14FdWb

Second, we will be at the +LinkedIn campus in Mountain View (yes, we are in the South Bay two months running) with +Philip Tellis who will be presenting "The 3.5s Dash for Attention and Other Stuff We Learnt From R.U.M." +Philip Tellis a geek and the Chief RUM distiller at SOASTA. When he's not pulling numbers out of a cask, he spends his time cycling around Cambridge or cooking with his wife (but not at the same time). He is also the creator of boomerang.js. As you know R.U.M. is a topic very close to my heart and I expect to hear some very interesting things at this presentation. RSVP now! http://meetu.ps/14FS6q

So it is a busy next coupe of weeks in the +SF & SV Web Performance Meetup. We are thrilled to be hosting 3 meetups over the next few weeks. Attendance of course if free, but space is usually limited. Sign up early!

Test, measure, optimize, rinse, and repeat. It is a mantra by which we all work. In this presentation, Mehdi Daoudi, will offer us his unique perspective into web operational and performance monitoring and his work on the "other" side of the fence.

Super excited this morning because I was able to give everybody on the current waitlist for +WebPerfDays.org a pass to the event. Those individuals have 24 hours to respond before those passes go to the next eligible waitlister.

If you are not on the waitlist for WebPerfDays, you should be because so far all tickets are spoken for. Who knows? Maybe +Google will discover some hidden, as of yet, unreserved larger auditorium!

Register now because being on the waitlist is your best bet to round out your Web Performance Week after +O'Reilly Velocity Conference. The waitlist is first come, first served and you will get 24 hours to accept a pass should one come available due to cancellation or even expansion.

There are only 27 slots currently left for +WebPerfDays.org! I hope to be able to add still more physical capacity and release addition passes, but if you want in and you do not want to risk the waiting list then act fast!

As update, we are pleased to announce that we have even been able to add yet another presenter to our lineup and 1 more igniter. We are anticipating a really great day of topical structured and unstructured discussion.

Remember, passes are entirely without cost, but space is limited and you will need a pass in order to attend. Even lunch is covered courtesy of our sponsor and host +Google.